


Shelter from the Storm

by smolassassinchildx (smolassassinchild)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, POV Alternating, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-18
Updated: 2009-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 06:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolassassinchild/pseuds/smolassassinchildx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they're out of the rain, she lets go of him and he holds on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shelter from the Storm

The first time Lee Adama finds himself underneath Kara Thrace, he still hears the bullets firing above them. Her nails are digging into his shoulders, head ducked against his neck. He’s cut and bruised and fairly sure he’s sprained something on the way down the ravine. He’s in pain, but it means he’s alive, and he’s pretty sure it’s all because of her and she knows it.

She winces when she stands and drags him to his feet saying, “Thank me later, Apollo.”

\---

A drop of water hits her in the face.

And then another one.

And another one.

And _another._

“Does this frakking rain ever stop!?” she snaps. She leans against a tree and turns back towards Lee, who is still a few steps behind, favoring a wrenched ankle. “Come on, Lee, hurry it up.” She should give him a shoulder probably. But right now she’s not sure how much longer she can stay upright on her own, let alone support his weight too.

“The rain has to stop sometime,” he says, walking up alongside her.

She shifts her weight and feels the throbbing in her side again. Stupid frakking Lee, getting in the line of fire, making her save his pathetic ass yet again. Kara wonders for a moment if she ripped out the stitches, but she can’t check, not now, so she casually asks him, “Need a break?”

“No, let’s just keep going.” He turns his gaze up towards the sky, which is grey, and grey, and the exact same frakking color it’s been all day yet somehow he knows, “It’s going to be dark soon. I want to get back to the others.” His eyes settle on her again and they’re saying _talk to me, Kara_. “Unless you need a rest.”

She folds her arms over her stomach and marches on forwards. “Let’s go.”

\---

The rain has to let up sometime. Doesn’t mean it won’t turn into a full-blown tempest before it does. They’re lucky enough to find a cave to take shelter in but not quite lucky enough to have a lighter or matches or even dry wood to get a fire going.

Lee peels off his camouflage jacket and spreads it out against the floor of the cave to dry out. When he looks at Kara, she’s by the far wall, dropping the canister containing the arrow at her feet. The damp fabric of the C-Bucs sweatshirt clings to her and her hair is matted against her face making her look like a drowned rat. “Here, give me your sweatshirt.”

“I don’t think so,” she says, sliding down to the floor.

“You’ve got to get out of those wet clothes.”

“Gods, Lee,” she quirks an eyebrow at him, “are you really that eager to see me naked?”

“Oh come on, Kara. It’s not like it’s anything I haven’t seen before.” Which is a fact. He’s seen her naked more times than he can count, that’s just the way life goes on a battlestar. She should know that by now. Lee throws his arms in the air. “You’re going to get sick.

She ducks her head and turns away. “I’m fine. Just forget about it.”

Something about the way she’s sitting huddled against the wall makes her look small and so distinctly not-Starbuck that it kicks him in the gut. He doesn’t know what happened to her back on Caprica—doubts she’ll ever let him know—but it’s almost like when she came back, she left a part of herself behind.

He’s about to go off and sit at the mouth of the cave and keep watch, when he sees her curl her knees to her chest, trembling slightly—and he doesn’t know if it’s the cold or something else entirely—but he sinks down to the ground next to her.

She jerks away, flinching from his touch as he slides an arm around her shoulder. “Lee, what the hell are you doing?”

“I just got you back; I’m not going to let you freeze to death.” This time, when he puts his arms around her, she lets him. She lets him pull her against his chest and the dampness of her clothes seeps right through his tanks to his chest, but it doesn’t matter because he can feel her start to relax in his arms. So he smiles down at her and laughs. “Your hands are ice.”

There’s actually a trace of a smile on her lips, and she tucks her hands under his arms. “Well, your body heat is mine now.” She shifts, and he imagines she’s about to rain down death threats on him—that if he ever tells a soul that he let Kara “Starbuck” Thrace just lie in his arms until she stopped shaking she will tear him limb from limb. Instead, her eyes slide shut.

A roll of thunder rumbles outside. The storm is getting closer.

Lee‘s hand traces a few small circles against her shoulder and she lets out a sleepy sigh. Absently, his hand shifts down to her hip and she suddenly jerks away with a yelp of pain.

“Are you okay?”

“Do I _sound_ okay to you, genius?”

He scoots closer to her. “Did you hurt yourself when we fell? Here, let me take a look.”

“It’s fine. Alright, just leave it alone!” She bats his hand away as he reaches for her shirt. Despite the dampness, he can clearly see a prominent stain forming over her left hip.

“You’re bleeding.”

She looks down briefly before her head falls back against the wall of the cave. “Frak, frak, _frak_!” she hisses to herself.

He moves closer. She doesn’t move away, doesn’t hit him when he unzips her shirt and finds blood-soaked bandages instead of new wounds. “My gods, Kara, what is this?” No answer. “Did you get… are these from Caprica?” No answer again. “Kara, talk to me.”

She turns towards him, and all of a sudden her eyes are as icy as her hands—like she’s gone somewhere, like even though he’s touching her she’s never been further away.

“What do you want to hear, Lee?” she asks. Her voice is very tight, almost measured. “Do you want to hear about how Helo and I found a group of resistance fighters? How when we went to attack an airbase, we were ambushed and I got shot?” Her teeth grit on the last few words. “How everyone fell back and I got left behind?”

She gets to her feet, it looks like she’s trying to keep herself pulled together, but the effect is diminished by the way she needs to clutch the cave wall for balance._ Frak. _She’s in more pain than she’s letting on.

“You want to hear all the gory details of how I passed out and woke up in a hospital run by the frakking cylons? How they kept me drugged up and operated on me and…gods only know what else?”

Kara draws in a deep breath; a panicked look flickers through her eyes and there is a sharp edge to her voice. “So they could turn me into an incubator to start making some frakking cylon spawn.”

She’s shaking now and Lee shoots to his feet, grabbing his arm to steady her, but she turns on him, nearly spitting. “Because, you know, that’s what they’ve been doing to all the women who survived back there—plugging them into to these frakked-up breeding farms and knocking them up with half-toaster babies.” He watches her, stunned, trying to process her words. “You want to hear about how I killed those women so they wouldn’t have to suffer anymore? Is _that_ what you want to hear so badly, Lee?!”

Her hands are clenched tight, her chest stilled, and she’s waiting, waiting for his response.

“Yes.” He doesn’t realize how it sounds until it’s out of his mouth and it looks like she wants to rip his tongue out. “I mean, no! Obviously no, but… yes.” He reaches for her shoulders and she slaps his hands away.

"Frak you."

"Kara,” he tries to lock eyes with her, but she just averts her gaze. “That's not what I— I just want you to talk to me, okay?"

“I just told you the whole thing, what else do you want from me?“

"I don’t want—"

She winces and cuts him off. “You know what, Lee? I'm tired.” She sinks back down to lie on the ground. “I'm tired, and I'm bleeding, we don't have any frakking bandages or spare stitches or... frakking anything, and the rain clearly isn’t stopping, so I’m going to sleep, okay?"

Kara turns her back to him, curls her knees to her chest, and closes her eyes, but she’s still shivering. Lee gets down beside her and drapes an arm around her, pressing up along her back.

“What are you—”

“Keeping you warm,” he says.

She grumbles and shifts against him and finally mutters, “Fine, but if I kick you in my sleep, it’s your own damned fault.” But she curls back against him and falls asleep. He lies there with his eyes open, listening to the thunder that cracks the night and the sound of her even breathing.

\---

Everything is yellow light, the smell of antiseptic, and halls that go on forever. There must be some way out of here, she knows there has to be, she just can’t remember. She’s gotten out before, hasn’t she? Fear is pulsing through her veins and her lungs strain for air.

_Kara._

She doesn’t see his face, but she knows it’s him, knows it’s the man who smiled and told her he was a doctor and his hands close over her shoulders. Her first instinct, only instinct, is to fight. She rips herself out of his grip and fights back, fists and nails—her only weapon is her body and she won’t let them take that from her.  
_  
Kara, Kara._

Hands tighten on her wrists and she screams and suddenly everything is dark. She’s opened her eyes.

“Kara, hey. Hey, it’s alright.”

But it’s not, the words are a lie. She barely has time to process the fact that she’s awake before she’s on her feet and running—out, just out.

Lightning streaks across the sky, rain pounding down, cold wind stinging at her skin, and the pain in her side is burning, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, she just needs to keep running. It doesn’t matter where but she needs to be away, away from that frakking place. The thunder follows so abruptly, and she can feel the tremor in her gut.

She doesn’t stop, wouldn’t even stop at all, but a tree root catches her unawares and she tumbles to the ground. On instinct, she looks behind her, looking for a pursuer, but there is no one—nothing—there. Sitting up, she leans back against the tree trunk, staring up into the rain.

_Frak._ It’s pathetic—truly frakking humiliating, actually—that she’s sitting out here in the mud, in the rain with tears running down her cheeks. Starbuck shouldn’t cry—_doesn’t_ cry—and yet. She doesn’t know who the hell she is anymore, why the hell she lashed out at Lee, it’s not like any of it was his frakking fault; all he was doing was trying to comfort her.

Gods, she shouldn’t have told him. Should have just kept her big mouth shut, pretend it never happened. It’s not like it even really matters, she got out and it’s over, and it shouldn’t be eating away at her like this.

Another flash of lightning reveals a figure moving towards her and she’s on her feet, reaching for her sidearm. In the moment she started to curse herself for realizing she must have left it in the cave, she hears Lee’s voice through the thunder. “Hey, it’s just me.” She can only barely see him in the darkness, but another flash goes off and for a split second she can see four parallel scratches across his cheek. “It’s okay now.”

“No, Lee. It’s not.” She hopes he can’t tell the tears from the rain through the darkness. “It’s not okay, godsdamnit!”

He scrubs a hand over his mouth. “Look, Kara, I know this is hard, and I know you’re in pain and—”

“You _don’t _know!” she says, the words ripping at her throat on the way out. “You have no frakking idea what it was like! You _can’t_ know. You weren’t _there_, Lee.” One heavy breath comes out sounding pathetically like a sob. “_You_ weren’t there.”

Something passes over his face as he looks at her but it’s too quick for her to read. “Come on,” he says after a moment, taking her hands. His voice is soft and sweet and _Lee_, and, gods it’s stupid, but she squeezes his hand a little bit just to make sure she isn’t dreaming it. “We need to get out of the storm.”

\---

Kara doesn’t talk on the way back to the cave, but she does offer Lee her shoulder to lean on to take some of his weight off his injured leg. When they’re out of the rain, she lets go of him and he holds on. “Thank you.”

She shrugs it off and shrugs him off. “Whatever. No big deal.”

“Not for letting me lean on you.” He can’t read her expression when she turns back towards him—but she does turn back towards him. “You told me to thank you later, so thank you, Kara, for saving my ass—for having my back. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you had to go through everything that happened to you on Caprica. I’m sorry I couldn’t have your back, that I couldn’t be there for you.” His hand is on her shoulder and she doesn’t brush him away. “But I’m here now, and if there’s anything I can do… anything to make things even a little less worse, I—”

And for absolutely no reason he can even think of Kara’s lips are on his, her fingers digging into the back of his head like she’s clutching onto him for dear life. He brings both his hands to her shoulders and gently pushes her back and she stares back at him with this look in her eyes that’s almost desperate. “Kara, what—”

“You want to be here for me?” she breathes. “Well, this is how I want it.”

Lee drops his forehead to hers and closes his eyes. “Not like this, Kara. This isn’t right, I feel like I’d be taking advantage of you, and gods know you’ve been through enough lately. But if you need to talk—”

“Frak talking; I don’t need to talk.” She tilts her face towards his and steals a kiss. “I need to forget.” And another. “Just help me forget, okay?”

\---

His name is on her tongue when she comes, and when she collapses on top of him, he wraps his arms around her and holds her to his chest. Little tremors still flutter through her and gods, gods,_ gods_ she’d needed that.

His hands trace patterns along her spine as if to say_ I’ve got your back _and she buries her face against his shoulder, listening to the sound of his breathing. His skin is warm against hers, and so is his breath on her ear when he whispers, “Doing okay?”

She rests a hand on his chest; she isn’t sure that if she falls asleep right now the nightmares won’t come surging back. “Getting there,” she says.

And it’s in that moment that Caprica is gone from her mind, replaced by the sudden realization that it was _Lee Adama_ who she just frakked into the ground and it was _Lee Adama _who has his arms around her, and is still very naked and still very pressed against her, and she remembers being desperate to break free of the dreams that were haunting her but… shit.

He must feel her tense underneath his hand because he asks, “What’s wrong?”

_What’s wrong? _She thinks. _Where to start?_

She just screwed her dead fiancé’s brother for one thing, she’s got another guy on a planet waiting for her to come back and save his ass, and on top of all that Lee’s got some stupid puppy look in his eyes like maybe it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue when he said he loved her. She turns her head and buries her face against his neck just so she won’t have to look at it anymore.

Maybe this was just another big frakking mistake, but when it came to her and Lee, that was pretty much par for the course.

“Kara?” Lee shifts beneath her and rolls her onto her back. He’s propped up on one elbow and his voice is all soft and concerned and _frak, frak, frak_. Kara doesn’t know if getting off was worth all this.

“Nothing,” she replies and hopes she sounds sincere, but his gaze is scrutinizing like he sees right through the lie. “It just hurts a little.” It’s a part of the truth.

His hand shifts to the bandages on her stomach, and she fights the urge to flinch away. “Can I take a look?” he asks.

She really should just push him back right now, but she’s tired so she tells him to knock himself out and closes her eyes as he peels back the bandages. The wounds are sore, but his touch is gentle.

“They’re not bleeding anymore, and I don’t think they’re infected,” he says, pressing the bandages back into place with a light hand. “But we should get some antiseptic on it and clean bandages when we get back to the group—there should be some in the medkit.”

He stretches out alongside her and pulls her against him, and, gods, he’s warm and there’s something about lying pressed up against him that just feels good. Still, she can’t ignore the sinking feeling in her gut, because the gods have never let her stay this happy for very long. She brings her fingers up to Lee’s face and traces her fingers along his cheekbone and feels him smile at her touch, and she can’t lose him. So for tonight, for just _one _night, she relaxes against him, lets him hold her, and lets him make her feel safe.

Because if it’s just one night, maybe she can get away with being happy; as if the gods have given her permission, she sleeps without nightmares.

\---

The second time Lee Adama had found himself underneath Kara Thrace, he wakes up wondering if it was all a dream. But there’s evidence to the contrary—when he opens his eyes, he’s naked and his clothes lie in a heap beside him. A few feet away, Kara is already awake and dressed and shoving her feet back into her boots. “Morning,” he says, pushing himself up to sit. He isn’t sure what time it is, but he can’t imagine they’ve slept too long—the light filtering in through the trees is an early morning pale red.

“Morning,” she echoes.

“Sleep well?”

“Like a baby.” She’s silent for a moment before she adds, “Get dressed, we’ve got to catch up with the others.” So he does, and as he’s working his way back into his pants she glances over at him. “Hey, Lee?”

“Yeah?” There’s something soft about her voice that instantly unsettles him. He couldn’t really say he didn’t see it coming. Last night, with her pleading him to help her forget, he would have done—did—anything to make her pain go away; he knew—_knew_—that come morning there would just be more she’d want to forget.

“Thanks,” she says and she sounds honest, “for everything last night.”

His nerves dull slightly, but he knows this isn’t over yet. He steps towards her and she doesn’t step back. “Don’t mention it,” he says, starting to feel emboldened. Maybe he hasn’t screwed this up. Maybe last night actually changed something between them. Maybe… just maybe. “Look, Kara I—”

“You’re my friend,” she says, cutting him off a little too quickly. He wonders if the smile on her face is really forced or if he’s just imagining it. “You’re my friend, you love me, you’re here for me. Yeah, I heard the speech.”

“Right.” His heart drops into his stomach but he pushes a smile onto his face. “Anything you want to get off your chest, I’m here.” He holds his hand out to her, smile becoming more sincere as she reaches out to shake it.

“I think I’ve gotten enough off my chest; don’t you agree, Lee?” The grin that flashes across her face is just classically Starbuck; she winks at him and he thinks that even if he can’t_ have_ her, seeing her back to herself is good enough. For now.

Lee sets his lips in a firm line and raises an eyebrow. “Enough?” He pauses, musing on the thought. “Wow, I don’t know how my ego can ever recover,” he deadpans.

Kara tightens her grip on his hand and her eyes light up—and gods he could stare into those eyes for hours. “Of course,” she says after he’s not sure how long, “you breathe one word about this little episode and you’re a dead man, Adama.”

“My lips are sealed,” he promises, even as his gaze slips down to her lips, remembering the feel of them pressed against his.

Slowly she pulls her hand away and starts to bend down to grab the canister, but recoils, clutching her side.

“Here, let me,” he says.

“No, it’s okay, I got it,” she protests, but not before he’s able to snatch it up.

He hands her the cylinder, fingers brushing briefly against hers as she takes it from him. “I told you,” he says, “I’m here for you. Okay?”

Kara slings the canister over her shoulder before giving a conciliatory shrug. “Okay. Now, let’s move out.” She nods towards the mouth of the cave and heads out into the early morning light. Shoving his hands into his pockets, Lee pauses, watching the way the sunlight hits her, sidearm at the ready, looking nothing like the frightened woman in the rain and not-unlike a goddess of war herself.

For now, he forces himself to believe that that is all he needs. He draws his weapon, and follows her out into the woods.

He has her back.

\--End--


End file.
